Lucilfer (ChrolloxReader)

Chapter 84

There it was, the anger that I'd dreaded. It gashed my resilience. My teeth clenched together painfully, and I begged the building cries to subside, to at least allow me to respond coherently.

This is what you wanted, right? You'll have nothing else to hide.

But not like this. There was so much misunderstanding now; so much had been muddled and damaged beyond repair. He was assuming the worst, but what could I say to change that? As paralyzed as I had become by his bone-chilling aura, the ghostly pale of his complexion, the blackening of his irises branding straight through me, I knew that he was hurt. I had hurt him.

Use Feeler Inversion. Project it now. Don't allow him to torture himself this way any longer.

I couldn't. I was frozen. I was waiting to see in him, in my lover, what I had been haunted by my entire life. I was so close to slipping away from the present—my heart was racing, thudding obnoxiously in my ears, and my vision had blurred around the corners; my inhales were nothing but stifled, sharp gasps, and uncontrollable trembles had returned to my limbs. But this time, the one I had learned to turn to when memories consumed me was the one who sparked those memories to begin with.

No. No, it can't happen this way.

I regarded him with the wary tendency of a caged animal, but I didn't want to. Perhaps such was why the tears continued to fall. I didn't want to see him this way, but I had no choice—not a flicker of empathy, or any feeling at all, shone in his gaze.

"Kurapika," I choked out, forcing words through a gritted jaw, still striving against the rising whimpers. "Kassidy... is—the chain user."

I waited for a reaction—inwardly, I cowered away from that reaction. I waited for seconds, and then minutes, for a violent outburst, for yelling, and even, in reflex, for degrading insults to be hurled my way, but all that continued to happen was the death of his stare, wide and unforgiving. And perhaps this was worse. The calm of his reaction was what elicited the tingling fright crawling over every inch of my skin, and it was entirely unfamiliar, strange, otherworldly. I'd never known a fear like this before in my life.

I'm not afraid of you. You won't hurt me. You can't hurt me.

But those thoughts were only desperate tries to convince myself against what I foresaw, what I predicted, what I'd known would happen as an engrained punishment after messing up so badly. Still, I thought them. I wanted to believe them, yet I was once again reminded of how fragile a system of new belief is when compared to what is drilled into the brain of a helpless child. And such was exactly what I felt like in that moment.

A helpless child—vulnerable, exposed, weak. You've ruined everything, (Y/n).

Chrollo didn't move. His eyes regarded me loftily, and I felt small under their scald—I hated them, and I feared them. They weren't the eyes of my lover.

"You knew," he whispered plaintively—had the circumstances been any different, and had I not been the subject of such consuming emotion pulsing from his aura, I might've read something like pain in that voice. "You knew, and yet you chose to stay with him. You begged me to stay with him."

I winced at the blade of his tone.

"You could've said no," I hissed shakily, slipping into a high-pitched whine.

I knew it was unfair of me to say something so unrealistic—I wouldn't have let him say no. But I knew my own intentions. I had to stay with Kurapika; I had to protect Chrollo.

You would be dead, or severely impaired, had I not done this. My mind huddled away from the thought.

But it seemed that he, too, could see the lie in my words, and not just from my own perspective. A flicker of defense glimmered in his shadowed gaze, and his jaw drew infinitesimally more taut, but apart from those minor changes, his expression remained void.